![]() ![]() In 1787 Wordsworth went to Cambridge as an undergraduate, and in the summer of 1790 surprised his friends and family by going on a three-month walk through France, Switzerland, and Italy. It has been said that much of his earlier verse was strongly influenced by Gothic romances but Wordsworth was never a strong plotter, and this influence comes through mainly in atmosphere and tone, as well as in his strong sense of nature. His first poem was written in praise of the work of a popular poet named Helen Maria Williams. ![]() Powerfully affected from a young age by the natural world around him, Wordsworth was also strongly influenced by literature and fiction. He’d already started in boarding school, which he attended from 1779 to 1787 1787 was also the year his first poem was published. Wordsworth’s mother died early in 1778 when he was seven, and his distant father died in 1783. ![]() ![]() Besides three brothers, Wordsworth had a sister, Dorothy, who was closest to him in age and temperament she’d live with him for much of his adult life, and several of the observations in her journals would find their way into his poetry. His father, John, was a legal representative of a powerful landowner in the north-west of England, and although not wealthy, the family was comfortably well-off. To begin with some biography: Wordsworth was born in 1770. Bradley once wrote that “The road into Wordsworth’s mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them.” I want, then, to explore here one of those paradoxes: how the depiction of nature and the everyday attains a sense of the fantastic. I think that the way he works out that duality verges on the fantastic how he deals with his material uses imagery and structures that would later become characteristic of what we think of as fantasy fiction. The interplay of vision and nature in Wordsworth is more complex, and accounts for some of the fascination of his work. Wordsworth is one of the great nature poets in the language - and in this makes a strong contrast to Blake, who felt that nature was significant only to the extent that it was transmuted by human imaginative vision. Some of that is a function of his preferred imagery. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that there was something fantastic in Wordsworth’s verse. He claimed to take as his subject the “simple produce of the common day,” and much of the newness of his verse came in the realism of his depiction of human personality, especially that of children and the poor - people who had for the most part not been looked at seriously in poetry up to that time. Unlike Blake, he did not explore his vision through fantasy. Like Blake, Wordsworth was concerned with the visionary nature of poetry, and with the character of his own poetic vision. And in this post (and its sequel) I want to consider perhaps the least overtly fantastic of all major Romantic poets: William Wordsworth. Last time, I looked closely at the work of William Blake. Wordsworth romanticism series#The series began with this introductory post, continued with an overview of the neo-classical eighteenth century the Romantics revolted against, considered the Romantic themes in English writing from 1760 to about 1790, then looked at elements of fantasy and Romanticism in France and Germany before returning to England to consider the Gothic. This post is part of an ongoing series about fantasy and the literary movement called Romanticism specifically, English Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ![]()
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